Month: December 2016

Nobody should be under any illusions as to the reason for mounting pressure on the health service, argues Ken Livingstone – it’s government policy.

OVER the past months we have seen a stream of stats and reports showing the extent of the mounting problems facing the NHS due to Tory austerity, which has meant cuts and persistent underfunding, and the accompanying crisis in social care.

These are a consequence of the largest financial squeeze in the NHS’s history, meaning that by 2018 NHS spending per head will be falling. Read the full article

The current and ongoing issues with Southern Rail should be another nail in the coffin of the failed experiment that has been the privatisation of our railways.

It is the latest in a series of examples that illustrate just what a bad deal for taxpayers the privatisation of the railways has turned out to be.

From the fiasco of Railtrack, to the issues around Metronet (in charge at one point of two-thirds of the misguided public private partnership (PPP) on the Tube), to the temporary nationalisation of the East Coast line, to the chaos around Southern today, railway privatisation has totally failed. Read the full article

A major report issued this week shows the extent of the Tories’ big lie that they are making work pay, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE.

This week’s Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Monitoring of Poverty and Social Exclusion report showed the true scale of the human impact of six years of ideologically-driven austerity, following the Chancellor’s recent Autumn Statement which confirmed the economic difficulties we are now facing.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation in the report is that 7.4 million people in poverty are in working households, showing that despite all their false promises the Tories are not “making work pay.”

This means that more than half of those living in poverty (a total of 13.5 million people) are now in working households — a record high for in-work poverty, with the number of workers in poverty up 1.1 million since 2010/11. Read the full article